Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “Also—girls?” the boy asked.

  She nodded. “And younger sons.”

  He flushed. Adrian glanced at him, and she saw tenderness in the look. She wondered how she had missed it before. “What are you going to do with us?” he asked.

  “My people need information from you,” she said. “We will get it anyway we can. I am sorry to torture your father, but we have no choice.”

  At that he smiled. “Ort is not my father. He is an old man with more passion than sense.”

  “He’s not as dumb as all that,” she said. “His knowledge of colloquial Nye is better than any I have heard here. He should be at home as well, helping to negotiate a peace.”

  “No one has negotiated a peace,” Adrian said.

  “No one has offered.” Jewel put her hands on her calf.

  “Is that what you wanted us here for? So that we could go back with word that you want peace?”

  She shook her head. “You’re not going back. We can’t let you out of here.”

  “What—place this is?” the boy asked. “No sky.”

  “Or sun or rain or weather.” She leaned forward just a bit, feeling closer to the boy than she wanted to. “This is where we live until we win.”

  Adrian laughed. “The Fey have never been in retreat before. What makes you so sure you will win?”

  “You,” she said, and believed the calmness in her own voice.

  “Me?” The smile on his lips didn’t meet his eyes. “I am no one. Just a man who joined a fighting force last summer to defend his homeland.”

  “And has some degree of expertise because he came on this important raid,” she said.

  He shook his head. “We’re not a fighting people. I am the first man in the history of my family to face battle. I was in the raid because I was convenient, not because of my skill.”

  Probably true, but not really relevant. What was important was the fact that the three of them had used the poison and probably understood how it was derived. The added side benefit, as Caseo had pointed out, was that the Warders could learn the effects of the poison on the Islanders themselves.

  She sighed and leaned back. “You could save yourself some anguish,” she said. “You could tell us how your poison works.”

  “I think you’ve seen how it works,” he said dryly.

  Vividly. And it frightened her. But she wouldn’t let him know that. “I want to know what makes it work.”

  He laughed. “Then don’t ask me. I throw the stuff. I don’t make it.”

  “It’s made?” she asked. One of Caseo’s theories had been that the poison was from a stream or a lake somewhere.

  “I believe so,” he said. “But I don’t know. I am not in the upper echelons of Rocaanism.”

  She frowned. “What was the poison used for before?”

  “The water? It is used in our religious ceremonies. The holy water is passed through the congregation, and they dip their fingers into it and use it to clean off the tiny ritual swords that members always carry.”

  “Did you have a sword?” she asked.

  He shot a quick glance at his son. The boy was looking at his hands. “I am not a believer,” Adrian said.

  “Your religion, then, it is not political or required? It is a choice?” That was new to her. She had never encountered that before.

  He shrugged. “No one says anything if that’s what you mean. I feel it’s not right to mouth platitudes if I do not believe them.”

  But his son believed. She could tell from his attitude. The boy couldn’t speak Nye, but he did understand it—when he wasn’t feeling a pressure to respond. She spoke half a dozen languages like that. If she didn’t concentrate on them, she understood them. But the moment she was required to perform, she couldn’t. She would have to remember that about him and warn the others.

  “Did you have a ritual sword, Luke?”

  At the sound of his name, the boy’s head jerked up. His eyes were shiny with fear. “They—it—not anymore,” he said.

  “Someone took it.”

  He nodded.

  She swallowed, wanting to run from the room, to warn her people not to touch the sword’s blade. But they had probably figured that out. Fortunately, the ritual symbol for the religion was easily recognizable as a weapon. “What’s the purpose of cleaning the little sword?” she asked.

  “The Elders say the Roca did that to his own sword before he died,” Adrian said.

  Jewel smiled. “For a nonbeliever, you are very knowledgeable.”

  “We are all raised in the Church,” Adrian said.

  “So what do they do to make your water holy?” she asked.

  Adrian shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Jewel sat up. “You don’t know? Or you won’t tell me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. His tone was sullen.

  She turned to the boy. “Do you?”

  He glanced at her, and then at his father. Adrian nodded, as if in encouragement. “I—I—” the boy stammered. “Ah, no.”

  “But you were all raised in the Church.”

  “That doesn’t mean we understand everything about it. Religion needs to be somewhat mysterious to work,” Adrian said.

  The hair rose on the back of her forehead. The Mysteries. Perhaps they disguised them in different ways. “Yet you know how to use this poison.”

  “As a religious item? Of course. We didn’t learn about its other properties until you folks came on the scene—at least, none of us outside the upper echelons of Rocaanism knew.”

  She didn’t move, didn’t allow her expression to change. If they didn’t know about that particular property, how had they discovered it? She had to talk with her father. They needed more knowledgeable Islanders. “What does this poison do to you?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Adrian said.

  “It—” The boy said a word in Islander, then flushed. His eyes were bright with fear.

  “What did he say?” she asked Adrian, her tone harsh.

  “It purifies.” Adrian’s voice was soft. He didn’t look at his son, but Jewel could feel his concern. She had frightened both of them with her treatment of Ort. They were afraid she would do something to Luke as well.

  “Purifies,” she said softly. “And how does purification make you different?”

  “It makes us acceptable to God,” Adrian said.

  The words sent a shiver through her. “And the Fey, then, can’t be purified?” she asked. “We are unacceptable to your gods?”

  “That—Danites—they say.” The boy spoke almost eagerly, as if in giving her that information, she would forgive him for slipping into his native tongue.

  She suppressed a sigh. So. Not only were they fighting a powerful poison, they were also fighting a superstition. It was a good thing her father had sent Doppelgängers to the Tabernacle. Perhaps they would find an entrance into the Islanders’ Mysteries. She couldn’t understand it all, not in this conversation. So she switched the subject. “Who is your commander?”

  “On this mission?” Adrian asked.

  She nodded.

  “Theron. He was picked by the King.”

  “So the King directs the battles?” She had trouble believing that. The man she had met was inexperienced and frightened. He didn’t seem capable of leading a force like this. But, then, Islanders had not seemed capable of defeating the Fey.

  “Some,” Adrian said. “But we have no formal system. We are not military people.”

  “So I gathered,” she muttered. “Tell me about your military, or what exists of it.”

  He shook his head. “We have no military. We have the guards who protect the King. The rest of us fight to save our homes, our children, and our lives.” He jutted out his chin as he spoke, as if she were going to rebuke him for his defiance. Instead, she had to suppress a smile. She liked their aggression, their passionate belief in their own rightness. Perhaps that, more than anything, gave them strength.

  “You make yo
urselves sound so noble,” she said.

  “We are,” he said.

  “We value our own principles as much as you value yours,” she said. “Just because you do not believe in them does not make them wrong.”

  She regretted the words as soon as she spoke them. He had got to her. And she hadn’t wanted him to.

  “Your principles are wrong,” he said, “if they cost me my life.”

  She stared at him for a moment, suddenly finding his defiance unappealing. She didn’t want to think in his terms, even though he had a point. “You’re safe enough,” she said blandly.

  “Like Ort?” he asked.

  “Ort will live.”

  “How well?”

  She let the words hang in the silence. Then she stood and looked down at him. “What other plans does your King have for fighting the Fey?”

  He didn’t tilt his head to look up at her. Instead he leaned back in the chair as best as his ropes would allow and gazed up without moving much, so that they still seemed to be on the same level. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you that. I am not a fool.”

  “No,” she said, “I suppose you aren’t.” She had already got enough from this conversation. She started to walk away when an idea hit her.

  She paused, then gazed at Adrian over her shoulder. He had turned to his son, whose lower lip was trembling like a babe’s. When they noticed she hadn’t left, their faces returned to neutral masks. But in that moment she had seen despair, and great love.

  “What kind of help would you give me if I let your son go free?” she asked.

  Adrian opened his mouth, but she waved a hand to silence him.

  “Don’t answer me now. Think about it.” She smiled, knowing she had him hooked. “The exchange would have to be an equal one. You would have to give me something worth a life that hasn’t even reached its halfway point.”

  With that she let herself out of the room. As soon as the door closed, her knees buckled beneath her. She braced a hand against the rough wood wall, ignoring the splinters that dug beneath her palm, and took a deep breath. She hadn’t realized how much energy she had put into that meeting. Another sign of the low level of panic she carried with her always. Part of her believed they would never leave this place. Such a belief had never bothered her before. She had no real home. Her family had been moving since the day she’d been born. But she had a community that included her grandfather and her brothers, as well as most of the Fey. This world here, in the Shadowlands, was a small, pale replica of the world she had left behind.

  When the moment of weakness passed, she went down the hall. Her father was standing beside the fireplace, staring at the piles of ash, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Well?” he asked without looking at her.

  “They claim they know nothing about how to make the poison, but it figures into their religion. The older one—Adrian—says that it is part of the ‘mystery’ of religion.” She walked up beside him and stared down as well. A charred log was half-buried in the ash. Grayness everywhere. How she longed for real color.

  “The mystery?” He straightened and finally sought her face as he was speaking to her. “Do they know?”

  “About our Mysteries? I don’t think so. But I don’t know. They could all be lying. They may know more about us than we could ever learn about them.”

  “Then why haven’t the Doppelgängers reported it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “The coincidence feels odd to me. First the poison, now the fact that it is connected to a mystery.”

  “You are looking for signs where there are none, child,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t rule things out this early in an interrogation,” she snapped. She had just spent her time discovering information only to have him dismiss it and call her “child” as if she were little more than a tiny girl with hopes and dreams instead of knowledge and experience.

  He sighed and returned his attention to the empty hearth. She wondered if he looked there because the cottage had no windows. It had no need for them. Everything looked the same outside, and the temperature remained the same as well.

  “What else did you learn?” he asked.

  “That our remaining two are father and son. And that the father might be willing to bargain for his son’s life.”

  Rugar smiled. “You are very effective, Jewel.”

  “Yes,” she said more sharply than she intended. “I am.”

  She left his side and pulled out a chair, sinking into it, letting the exhaustion creep over her. When he said nothing else, she felt as if she had to fill the silence. “I think they should be put somewhere together and given some freedom from those bonds. When the Warders are done with their companion, he should be placed with them as an example for the father of what might happen to the son. I think we will learn more from them that way.”

  “I’d like you to continue to interrogate them,” Rugar said.

  “In due time.” She would pick the time, although she did not tell him that. The exhaustion she was carrying created little black spots around the edges of her vision.

  “Have you ever thought,” she asked, “of negotiating a peace?”

  “What?” He barked the word out, as if shocked that a child of his would suggest such heresy.

  “A peace. Until we figure out a way around all of this.”

  He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “The Fey never negotiate from a position of weakness.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t have to keep the peace. Once we learn what we need, we might be able to conquer them after all. No one said we had to do it fairly.”

  “Whatever made you think of this?” His voice had a gruffness she hadn’t heard before.

  “The situation,” she said. “If Grandfather doesn’t come, and we keep losing people, we will die here. But if we stall and discover what gives them their power, we might have a chance to survive.”

  “It sounds like a coward’s solution,” he said.

  “It’s sensible,” she said. “We’ve already lost more on this campaign than any other in my memory.”

  “Things will change.”

  “Right.” She stood, and for the second time that day her knees buckled. She pitched forward, feeling the blackness overwhelm her, but helpless to stop it. Her father caught her, his arms warm and strong around her. His scent mingled with the leather of his clothing, and his chest was firm. Pain slashed her forehead.

  Her father was shouting, “Someone help her! Please help her!” but his voice sounded too far away. She opened her eyes. A sword hung over her head. They were in the Tabernacle, with all the lords and all the Fey leaders gathered around. The ceremony. She had ruined the ceremony. A man leaned over her, his eyebrows straight, his hair long and blond. His features were square. Nicholas. Tears floated in his eyes. He cradled her in his arms with a tenderness she had never felt before and said, Orma lii. Islander that sounded as familiar as Nye. Are you all right? Then he said her name over and over.

  Someone poured water over her face, and she cringed. Nicholas raised a hand to stop it.

  “Let them!” her father said, pulling Nicholas’s arms away. The burning in her forehead eased.

  Then the scene shifted. Nicholas still held her. She was wrapped in her father’s healing cloak, but she was in a room made of stone, lying on a mattress that made her sink as if she were in water. A Healer—Neri—was bent over her, chanting. She slapped a poultice on Jewel’s forehead. It smelled of redwort and garlic. “She’ll live,” Neri said, “but I can promise no more.”

  “What did she say?” Nicholas’s Fey was heavily accented, barely understandable.

  “That she’ll live,” her father said in Nye, “and maybe little more.”

  Nicholas made a keening sound in his throat and pressed her closer. “Jewel.” He kissed her softly, then brushed her hair away from her cheeks. “Ne sneto. Ne sneto.” I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  She touched him back. This night was not h
ow she had dreamed it would be.

  His arms tightened, and then he grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. “Jewel! Jewel!”

  Not Nicholas. Her father. She felt a vague disappointment, as if the pain was worth Nicholas’s touch. The darkness receded. She opened her eyes and found herself staring at the ceiling of their cabin. Her mouth was open, and drool ran down her chin. She brought her head up slowly, half expecting the burning in her forehead to stop the movement, but there was none.